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Career Tips |
Procrastination Kills Careers
Procrastination consists of phases. You may have
something boring or uncomfortable to tackle but
instead of doing it you do something else. You
try to do anything to keep away from the project
you must face. You stay off target to get away
from it. You wait until the appointed time
before you hasten to accomplish unfinished but
necessary and important tasks while making all
kinds of silly excuses why the task was not
completed.
Continuing to procrastinate is so much easier
than trying to change, and old are hard habits
die hard. We need cognitive therapy to help us.
You can begin by being aware and documenting how
you spend your time, understanding the patterns
of your work environment and your personal
lifestyle, and logging them on a daily basis
will be of great help to you. You can start with
a five minute plan to get you back on track, and
then you keep working on it everyday until the
habit is broken. Find out what works and what
doesn’t work for you.
If you are a type of person who waits for a
deadline, be sure to set some for a specific
time everyday, so that you can face series of
deadlines that culminates in the final act. If
that means you have to set deadlines for every
20 minutes in order to keep focus, and then do
it. All of us suffer a little form of
procrastination in one way or another. We stray
now and then from our work to say something to
our friend or co-worker or we gaze at someone
pretty passing our way some of us even day dream
but getting back to our unfinished task is the
thing that gets to most of us.
There are different types of procrastinators:
1. The avoiders procrastinator; who are
still so filled with fear of failure they can’t
complete a project, much less get started.
2. The arousal procrastinator; who seek
the thrill of working under pressure.
3. The mild procrastinator; who will
handle their time in their own way, no matter
what you tell them.
4. The yes procrastinator; who end up
saying yes to everything without giving thought
to priority.
Steps to overcome Procrastination
1. Stop assess yourself and do something
right now as soon as you have finished reading
this piece.
2. Have a plan on how you are going to
accomplish each task in the shortest possible
time and at the same time properly so you won’t
have to do them over again.
3. Separate the tasks by priority. In
your spare time you can do little projects that
do not necessarily have to be completed right
away but are simple thus giving you more time to
spend on the larger projects, sometimes we
cripple our own progress by over tasking,
overwhelming ourselves and taking on too muck at
once.
4. Give yourself realistic timeframes in
which you know a certain task can be done.
5. Manage your time better- This is
easier said than done but try to identify the
distracting and time consuming things around you
and then try to avoid them. (These may be
unnecessary chit chat, phone calls and e-mails
or your co-workers or family members with their
same everyday problems that you go out of your
way to try and solve.)
6. Write down the important tasks that
you have to accomplish and do them one at a time
ticking them off as you complete them. This
action will surely motivate you to continue so
that. Each day, you can see what you have
achieved and your progression out of
procrastination.
7. Try to find your own work rhythm. Ask
yourself when am I most productive? and
capitalize on this
8. Try to do the thing you least want to
do first in the morning and get it out of the
way. The more you delay, the enthusiasm that you
had initially will change and this project will
still be incomplete and will sit over your head
like a heavy cloud and will hamper your
progress, making you unproductive.
9. Always reward yourself when you have
accomplished a task don’t wait for others to
give you a compliment instead compliment
yourself it is one less thing on your to do
list.
As the saying goes “procrastination is a
thief of time” so don’t delay after reading this
get started on prioritizing and send
procrastination away.
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